karsten's Videogaming Talks: What modern Videogames will always miss

many thanks graciano1337. i'll start working on something else when this topics will lose interest.

 

Most modern games do seem to be basically the same game with slightly better graphics. When Tomb Raider came out I loved it, everything within the game seemed to make sense, from the going back and forth to the exploring and finding the routes and most importantly the game felt open enough to give you the sense of freedom and you always imagined what was round the corner, playing this game in the dark and seeing T-Rex for the first time made me jump. The AI wasn't perfect but you did feel like that the creatures and people were intelligent.

Fast forward to the now and the PS3 and what do we have? Uncharted, and admittedly I have only played the demo but the demo just felt like a game of tomb raider with prettier graphics, stupid ai and stupid gaps that a normal person could get through but you obviously can't. The game just felt like hand holding me all the way to the end of the level. On the basis of the demo, I felt no need to go out and buy said game, even if a number of websites are claiming it to be on of the best games of the year.... Tomb Raider Leg Ends although being the same game seemed to lack something.

Go back even further to the late 70s and early 80s and one popular genre which is now dead was the equivilent of the paperback novel and that was the text adventure game, one game that did require you to use your imagination much more then games today. Take the excellent Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. You get

You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't.
It is pitch black.

Which requires you to imagine a room you can see spinning around, which sounds much like a bad hang over. :icon_bigg

As the game goes on, > look under bed
There's nothing there. Well, there are a few soiled handkerchiefs, a book you thought you'd lost, a couple of foreign coins, and something else which can't be fully described in a family game, but nothing you'd actually want.

I miss these paperback type games, although it could be frustrating to play these games as the pharser will probably not do what you want. Give a teenager the HHGTTG game and most won't even get out of the first room...

Some games do get better, playing pole position, you can imagine you are Nelson Piquet but nowdays you can imagine you are Michael Schumacher or even Takuma Sato. Some genres like sports and racing do fire up the imagination even with high resolution HD widescreen graphics. It's easier to imagine you are driving around Suzuka if it looks like Suzuka rather then a track in a large expanse of green and it's easier to imagine a golf course if you can see the green from the tee rather then some fuzzy lines. Most people probably wouldn't play the original F1 game on the playstation over F1CE on the PS3 (well they might if they hate James Allen) but they might have quick blasts on old console / arcade racing games.

However one of the best selling PC Games in the UK is Football Manager and that does take imagination to play as there aren't no flash graphics, just lots of stats and text messages. You do feel like you are a football manager because watching looks of circles run across the screen makes you imagine a player running down the pitch, dodging three defenders, crossing the ball inch perfectly and your useless striker putting it into row Z.

Wii Sports is a good example of an game that uses your imagination as you first do a Mii that looks a little like you, although Nintendo hate people with beards and moustaces. Then playing the game you can imagine you are bowling a ball rather then sitting on your backside pressing a button in time so you feel part of the experience. Just a pity that some games feel like the control method has been shoe horned in rather then being part of the experience.

 

i agree with you 100% and the example you made is really fitting. i mean everything beside PES try the full version at hard difficulty in master league... play a couple of hours and you'll see the difference!

 

another article is about to come... it'll be another long read, that i hope will move the waters even more than this topic and get more views and replys

 

One Dollar spent in Graphics

is

one dollar less spent in Interactivity.

This is what I miss in all games.

I woul like to have N64 graphics, but virtual worlds hundred times
bigger as Morrowind, with no loading times.
Just Interactivity. Imagine a Silent Hill as big as Oblivion with a
coop mode. With interactivity from Shenmue.
Quests, less enemies, walking, searching, exploring...


Instead most games are:

Man / Woman
Gun / Knife
Fake Gameplay
4 - 8 hours
better shadows / textures
open end - Outro.
(with a "3" in the title of course)

 

I miss the intensity of old arcade games, mainly the beat em ups, 2d fighters and vertical shoot em ups.

 

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW

this topic touched the 1000th visitor!

i'm getting a little more intereste in writing the next article now

 

do it! they're always an interesting read. and i love how they produce intelligent responses.

 

i'll be working on something nice soon

 

thanks for the read, it confirms my point of view for most parts.

im looking forward to reading more.

 

I think that you have a good point Karsten. However, I wonder if this is just the result of an upbringing that will partly define our generation, rather than an aspect that defines human nature as a whole. Let me clarify what I mean with an example.

My old friends and I often times find ourselves reminiscing about the days of the SNES. We find ourselves talking about our feelings as children and the experiences we all had imagining, as you said, the sensory flavor of the game. Thus, our childlike imagination comes not from the act of imagining itself, but the relationship that arises when we think about imagining video games and our childhood. To simply put it: to think of 'imagining' for our generation (and older) is to think of the bliss of childhood. That is a relationship that we have created through our video gaming. Yet, as described in your post and as most older gamers find, newer games take away from the child's ability to imagine much of the sensory flavor. Thus, it may be that when the youth of the PS2+ generation grow up, they may not have as much shared experiences reminiscing about how they used their imagination. What their experiences have in common may be of a different nature than ours, and I believe that is an interesting question to think about (i.e. What will the commonalities of their experiences be and in which ways will they differ from ours?).

Is there anyway to 're-invent' our childhood experiences? To view them in new ways that enable us to somehow appreciate today's video games in a light that we can realize we did actually experience as children? Or are we doomed, figuratively speaking, to living under the auspices of our shared experiences as Imaginers...?

 

Great article, good points. What do modern videogames miss? Well, i guess everything that made games of the 80s and 90s unforgettable. What sprang out to me was the usage of certain colors. Especially the games by Namco. Compare the bright, highly saturated Tekken 2 with todays fighters and you'll know what i'm talking about. The usage of certain colors in the PlayStation era gave the games a 'warm' kind-of-feel that's quite difficult to describe. WipEout 2097 (XL in the U.S.) is another great example of this.

Modern games also use larger data carriers/mediums. Did it expand the games' overall playtime and replay-value? No, in fact many games of today feel rather short, and most do not have any replay-value whatsoever; most space is used up by the massive amount of texture data that constitutes the game's attention to detail, instead of other potential content. I'm not a major fan of trail & error games like Super Ghouls & Ghosts or something like that, but modern games are also way too easy in my opinion, you walk through them as if you're merely watching a movie. In fact, a lot of today's games are designed as if they are movies. Games back in the day may have been 'short' in the sense of containing fewer levels or fewer tracks, but there was always something in a game that made up that 'flaw', like the tons of unlockables, secrets, extras, different endings. Super Probotector/Contra III has less than 10 stages, but it's so fun and so varied that you'll forget that while (re)playing the game...it is just fun to pick up and play...

It seems that certain limitations (in terms of hardware capabilities) brought out the greatest creativity among developers. I.e., if you're capable of 'doing almost everything' possible, then you're past a certain level of genuine interest. Who wants to play a game that is almost 'life-like'? The whole idea of playing games, is to be able to 'immerse yourself into another world', where things look totally different. That's why the worlds of the Mega Mans and Sonic the Hedgehogs remain in the minds and hearts of millions of people...

There is of course the whole issue regarding violence in videogames which i will not go too far into right now. But i find it quite horrific that a vast majority of currently released titles are merely first person shooters that glorify war and excessive violence. Most people cannot make the distinction between the different modes of violence. It's as if you're into violent games or not, which is absolute nonsense. It's one thing to play through a game (as a hero) trying to save yourself from hordes of zombies or, being merely a mindless soldier 'killing' virtual soldiers or even innocent virtual civilians. There is also a satirical mode of violence, contained in games like the Grand Theft Auto series; these games can be seen as a social critique on modern culture. There's also 'comedy violence', contained in games like Mortal Kombat; games that are so exceedingly over-the-top that they cannot be taken serious in that sense.

Games should be fun and challenging again, instead of overly realistic and 'short'. There are exceptions of course. A game like Donkey Kong Country Returns springs to mind, but generally speaking...

The Wii will be the last 'new' console i ever bought, cause i'm gonna stick with buying old (unused) games.

No, nothing will match the 90s.

 

this is sick and so true, dont get me wrong im a huge fan of modern games but there was and is something special about old school gaming. No matter how far gaming comes along i think that people will still preserve and love the games that started it all